Celine Veríssimo – Short Bio

Céline Veríssimo is an architect graduated from ARCA/ETAC (1996), obtained her Masters in Sustainable Architecture at the University of Chiba, Japan (2001) and her PhD at The Bartlett Development Planning Unit – University College London, UK (2012). Recently, she developed a post-doctoral internship on Epistemologies of the South under the supervision of Boaventura de Sousa Santos at the Center for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra, Portugal (2021). She is currently Assistant Professor in the Integrated Master in Architecture and Urbanism, Department of Architecture, Art and Multimedia Gallaecia, Universidade Portucalense, Porto (2022). In 1999 and 2000 she trained at the architecture studios of Ken Yeang in Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia) and Shigeru Ban in Tokyo (Japan). From 1996 to 2006 she worked as an architect, researcher and lecturer in the areas of Design, Theory and History of Architecture, Urbanism and Landscape and Urban Political Ecology in Norway, Japan, Kuala Lumpur, Portugal and Mozambique. She was a professor in architecture faculties at ARCA/ETAC, and PARQ_EUVG, both in Coimbra, and at Portuguese Catholic University in Viseu. In 2014, Veríssimo was a Visiting Professor and from 2015 to 2022, she was Adjunct Professor in the Architecture and Urbanism Course and in the Postgraduate Program in Public Policies and Development at the Federal University for Latin American Integration (UNILA) in Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil, having been elected coordinator of the Interdisciplinary Center for Territory, Architecture and Design – CITAD/ILATIT (2017-2019). From 2016 to 2021, she was deputy leader of the MALOCA Cluster for Multidisciplinary Studies in Southern Urbanisms and Architectures. She also actively collaborates with the research cluster ¡DALE! Decolonizing Latin America and Its Spaces. Veríssimo has co-edited thematic issues and published articles in indexed journals such as Laje, Epistemologias do Sul, Journal of Political Ecology, V!RUS, projetare – Revista de Arquitetura e Urbanismo, Redobra, RCCS, and TeMA Journal of Land Use, Mobility and Environment, as well as book chapters published by Edunila, Routledge, Palgrave, Ashgate and Metales Pesados. Her work fronts, in teaching, research, outreach and administration at UNILA, enabled her to work with activists, social movements, popular leaders, Candomblé African-religious matriarchal communities, indigenous Guarani communities, teachers and students in a multidisciplinary ground-based approach. With these, Veríssimo establishes a spatial reading of socio-environmental conflicts, food insecurity and environmental racism, through a situated design approach aimed to assist the subalternized communities’ resistances, (re)existences and struggles for life, rooted in their knowledges, experiences, cosmovisions and ways of dwelling, building a bridge with previous research in Mozambique. Key-words: Architecture and nature, Political ecology, Participatory practices, Decolonial theory, Epistemologies of the south thinking, Alterity.